How well do ATI drivers work with Unity?

The open driver work from the archive (that gets set up by default) generally works on my ATI Fusion-based laptop. It's decently fast but not as fast as fglrx.

The fglrx drivers in the archive were faster, but would freeze my laptop once every few hours. The Catalyst 11.4 drivers that I manually installed from their website are the fastest and I've had no crashes yet.

Some people are reporting that disabling vsync has helped them:

• Performance being really choppy with ATI drivers

It works with the open source driver.

I think the package name is xserver-xorg-video-ati

I also think you need to completely uninstall the binary driver.

Here are instructions from the ubuntu wiki about how to remove the binary driver and install the open source one

To quote it:

sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh  # (if it exists)
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon 
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Then reboot.

i have a 4650mobility working in natty with fglrx ( atis proprietary driver ).

Notice : you MUST use the fglrx driver from within nattys repo and NOT use the *.run installers from amd.com/ati.com. The one in natty is a special pre-build version that can handle the new kernel and xserver.

Limitations : You cannot use unity or compiz , but unity-2d which gives you a similar experience,the dock and the globalmenu plus the ubuntu launcher :

Do this :

• How do I install and switch to the Unity 2D desktop?

If you want to improve the look and feel to resemble unity3d closer you can activate metacitys own composite feature in gconf.This gives shadows and blur. Optional of course.

I had glitches with the proprietary drivers after upgrading to 11.04. But the open source ones are working brilliantly in 11.04 with my ATI HD 5750 and 27" display (they didn't work at all on 10.10 for me). So there's a decent chance that it will work! Maybe try it out on USB first